Useful Searches

Everything Android is a community forum that makes it easy to ask questions about anything and everything Android. It's 100% free and no registration required (though we think it would be awesome if you joined our community). Our community of experts are here to help.

New DROID user battery life

I came from a dumb phone and have some ios devices but I just bought a DROID X2 and so far I love the phone but the battery sucks. Why when I went on a plane(phone powered off) did I turn it on and find the battery down low to 5%. And the phone was charged fully the night before. Also when I had it about 70% full and went to bed, I woke up to a dead battery. Is that how android is? Or is there something going on in the background that occurs even when the phone is off? Did I get a bad battery? Thanks for any help, I don't want to go to Apple for my phone but the battery really goes down when I don't use it which makes no sense to me. Sorry for rambling.

Moderator

Feb 7, 2007

111

Battery life in Android has some work to do. Its not great, and with the huge ass screen you have its going to be rough. My advise is to plug it in at night, its not a flip phone you can let sit for days on end, it needs juice!

You may also want try leaving GPS turned off unless your using a program that needs it. Also try using a different web browser from the market. I'm not real sure but I think the stock browser runs in the background unless you forceclose it. Again not sure if this will help you out any but those two things and an extended battery allows me to use my phone all day and still have about 40 percent battery left before getting home from work.

Bronze

Oct 23, 2010

15

OMG, I just put in this kernel this morning. It idles at less than 1%/hour. I'm 5.5 hrs off charger and at 96% charge. The other wicked about this kernel, quadrant 4400+ at max cpu and 3050 at 122/1228 and a custom governor. Needless to say it's silky smooth.

The DX2 sticky on XDA was posted on June 4 and there's 10 topics, so it's early yet and zero custom ROMs.

As for the OP, apps that will at least expose you to the strengths of Android.

A couple techniques to battery conservation. To begin with, discover your baseline performance by avoiding widgets and live wallpapers on your desktop for 24-48 hrs. One exception, a power widget bar that lets you quickly manage your radios. You want to be able to quickly toggle; wifi, 2G/3G, data, gps, bluetooth and airplane mode. Running every radio on your phone is a quick way to drain your battery.

I like the widget in CM7. You can choose things like, flip to 2G when on wifi, automatically. I also run the following widgets; facebook, twitter, news and the calendar mentioned above.

Also, for now reduce your notifications. Every notifier you have is consuming battery with a background process.

You can see your current background processes at SETTINGS | APPLICATIONS | RUNNING SERVICES.

Lastly do not, do not use a task manager. Android 2.2+ has a built-in TM and running two or more has them conflict with each other such that your battery drains like a water fall.

I can let my X2 go for 2 days without a charge, IF I am around the house. When I am out and about however, I have put put it on the charger nightly. As previously noted, put it on the charger nightly. If you use anything like desktop weather or live wallpaper, you will definitely want to charge it each night.

Thanks for the tips when I get a credit card hooked up to my google account I plan on checking out android specific things. And I get currently have quick access widgets to all the radios. I turned off gps and wifi since I'm on vacation there is only 3g. And when I was home I'm pretty sure it automatically turned off 3g because it wasn't on the status bar like it is now. But I'm happy to report that my.battery drastically improved and lasted tell whole day idling for the most part. Oh and I'm smarty2600 too on everything I cafe.

Also I have desktop weather running and an engadet widget but no live wallpaper. And the yahoo mail client app running in the background but I plan to delete it since it is constantly checking for mail.

On your email accounts you can set how often it checks for emails. On my buisness account I have it checking every hour. All my other accounts check every 4 hours. Only one you can't change is the gmail account because I think its a push type notification. This should help a little with the battery.